Dennison said that she thought he had either made way with himself or got out of the country, nobody knew, but they did know there was something wrong with the house.
“‘I knew folks acted queer when they asked me how I liked it when we first came here,’ says Mrs. Dennison, ‘but I never dreamed why till we saw the child that night.’
“I never heard anything like it in my life,” said Mrs. Emerson, staring at the other woman with awestruck eyes.
“I thought you’d say so,” said Mrs. Meserve. “You don’t wonder that I ain’t disposed to speak light when I hear there is anything queer about a house, do you?”
“No, I don’t, after that,” Mrs. Emerson said.
“But that ain’t all,” said Mrs. Meserve.
“Did you see it again?” Mrs. Emerson asked.
“Yes, I saw it a number of times before the last time. It was lucky I wasn’t nervous, or I never could have stayed there, much as I liked the place and much as I thought of those two women; they were beautiful women, and no mistake. I loved those women. I hope Mrs. Dennison will come and see me sometime.
“Well, I stayed, and I never knew when I’d see that child. I got so I was very careful to bring everything of mine upstairs, and not leave any little thing in my room that needed doing, for fear she would come lugging up my coat or hat or gloves or I’d find things done when there’d been no live being in the room to do them. I can’t tell you how I dreaded seeing her; and worse than the seeing her was the hearing her say, ‘I can’t find my mother.’ It was enough to make your blood run cold. I never heard a living child cry for its mother that was anything so pitiful as that dead one. It was enough to break your heart.
“She used to come and say that to Mrs. Bird oftener than to any one else. Once I heard Mrs. Bird say she wondered if it was possible that the poor little thing couldn’t really find her mother in the other world, she had been such a wicked woman.
“But Mrs. Dennison told her she didn’t think she ought to speak so nor even think so, and Mrs. Bird said she shouldn’t wonder if she was right. Mrs. Bird was always very easy to put in the wrong. She was a good woman, and one that couldn’t do things enough for other folks. It seemed as if that was what she lived on. I don’t think she was ever so scared by that poor little ghost, as much as she pitied it, and she was ‘most heartbroken because she couldn’t do anything for it, as she could have done for a live child.
“‘It seems to me sometimes as if I should die if I can’t get that awful little white robe off that child and get her in some clothes and feed her and stop her looking for her mother,’ I heard her say once, and she was in earnest. She cried when she said it. That wasn’t long before she died.
“Now I am coming to the strangest part of it all. Mrs. Bird died very sudden. One morning—it was Saturday, and there wasn’t any school—I went downstairs to breakfast, and Mrs. Bird wasn’t there; there was nobody but Mrs. Dennison. She was pouring out the coffee when I came in. ‘Why, where’s Mrs. Bird?’ says I.
“‘Abby ain’t feeling very well this morning,’ says she; ‘there isn’t much the matter, I guess, but she didn’t sleep very well, and her head aches, and she’s sort of chilly, and I told her I thought she’d better stay in bed till the house gets warm.’ It was a very cold morning.
“‘Maybe she’s got cold,’ says I.
“‘Yes, I guess she has,’ says Mrs. Dennison. ‘I guess she’s got cold. She’ll be up before long. Abby ain’t one to stay in bed a minute longer than she can help.’
“Well, we went on eating our breakfast, and all at once a shadow flickered across one wall of the room and over the ceiling the way a shadow will sometimes when somebody passes the window outside. Mrs. Dennison and I both looked up, then out of the window; then Mrs. Dennison she gives a scream.
“‘Why, Abby’s crazy!’ says she. ‘There she is out this bitter cold morning, and—and—’ She didn’t finish, but she meant the child. For we were both looking out, and we saw, as plain as we ever saw anything in our lives, Mrs. Abby Bird walking off over the white snow-path with that child holding fast to her hand, nestling close to her as if she had found her own mother.
“‘She’s dead,’ says Mrs. Dennison, clutching hold of me hard. ‘She’s dead; my sister is dead!’
“She was. We hurried upstairs as fast as we could go, and she was dead in her bed, and smiling as if she was dreaming, and one arm and hand was stretched out as if something had hold of it; and it couldn’t be straightened even at the last—it lay out over her casket at the funeral.”
“Was the child ever seen again?” asked Mrs. Emerson in a shaking voice.
“No,” replied Mrs. Meserve; “that child was never seen again after she went out of the yard with Mrs. Bird.”
THE GHOST CLUB, by John Kendrick Bangs
AN UNFORTUNATE EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF NO. 5010
Number 5010 was, at the time when I received the details of this story from his lips, a stalwart man of thirty-eight, swart of hue, of pleasing address, and altogether the last person one would take for a convict serving a term for sneak-thieving. The only outer symptoms of his actual condition were the striped suit he wore, the style and cut of which are still in vogue at Sing Sing prison, and the closely cropped hair, which showed off the distinctly intellectual lines of his head to great advantage. He was engaged in making shoes when I first saw him, and so impressed was I with the contrast between his really refined features and grace of mariner and those of his brutish-looking companions, that I asked my guide who he was, and what were the circumstances which had brought him to Sing Sing.
“He pegs shoes like a gentleman,” I said.
“Yes,” returned the keeper. “He’s werry troublesome that way. He thinks he’s too good for his position. We can’t never do nothing with the boots he makes.”
“Why do you keep him at work in the shoe department?” I queried.
“We haven’t got no work to be done in his special line, so we have to put him at whatever we can. He pegs shoes less badly than he does anything else.”
“What was his special line?”
“He was a gentleman of leisure travellin’ for his health afore he got into the toils o’ the law. his real name is Marmaduke Fitztappington De Wolfe, of Pelhamhurst-by-the-Sea, Warwickshire. He landed in this country of a Tuesday, took to collectin’ souvenir spoons of a Friday, was jugged the same day, tried, convicted, and there he sets. In for two years more.”
“How interesting!” I said. “Was the evidence against him conclusive?”
“Extremely. A half-dozen spoons was found on his person.”
“He pleaded guilty, I suppose?”
“Not him. He claimed to be as innocent as a new-born babe. Told a cock-and-bull story about havin’ been deluded by spirits, but the judge and jury wasn’t to be fooled. They gave him every chance, too. He even cabled himself, the judge did, to Pelhamhurst-by-the-Sea, Warwickshire, at his own expense, to see if the man was an impostor, but he never got no reply. There was them as said there wasn’t no such place as
